Beauty and the Beast

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Containment

Containment is a documentary that weaves three stories
about nuclear waste.

The first is a look at post-Fukushima Japan. The opening image is
of an abandoned town full of recent signs of life and industry.
Those who fled because of the Fukushima accident still have not
come back. There is also footage from inside a damaged reactor
that I hadn’t seen before, as well as some new footage from
the tsunami.

Year released

See also

DFF 38 (2015)

The second is the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. Reverend
Tomlin, an activist, takes us on a boat on the Savannah River.
There are no-fishing signs, but they don’t say why. Narrators tell
us what’s there (lots of radioactive waste) over creepy film
footage from the 1950s. One of the old scenes shows cardboard
boxes (!) of “radioactive waste” being buried under fifteen feet
of soil. There are better containment solutions than dirt and
cardboard, including steel tanks buried under stories of soil. But
as someone points out, if the tanks were to dissolve, they waste
would get to the Savannah River. With Yucca Mountain bowing out of
America’s nuclear storage, the site in Georgia has become a de
facto high-level waste storage facility.

The third story shows the small-town politics of Carlsbad, New
Mexico, which is the nearest city to the WIPP — the Waste
Isolation Pilot Plant. The WIPP will hold nuclear waste in a salt
mine, 600 meters below the surface of the earth. The footage from
Carlsbad shows the best of America’s can-do attitude. Workers in
polo shirts and hard hats maneuver containers of nuclear waste as
if it were cereal at Sam’s Club. The optimism is only slightly
tainted by a small fire deep in the WIPP that resulted in some
radiation exposure for the workers.

Containment brushes against the design problems of
warning humanity about the poison for 10,000 years. One designer
mentions the possibility that a future tunnel from Houston to San
Francisco might plow through the toxic waste — the point being
that maybe we need markers in a sphere around the waste, and not
just above it on the ground.

But a far more interesting film on 10,000-year design was already
released a few years ago. Into Eternity made the film
festival rounds about four years ago, and was a much more focused
and entertaining documentary.

The pace of Containment is “deliberate” — someone else
might say “slow.” People speak, and then the film gives a pause to
let the words sink in. It’s a little hypnotic, which may not be a
good thing if you’re cramming lots of films into your head at a
film festival.

I’m not sorry I saw Containment; it offers food for
thought on what to do about our nuclear waste. It also showed that
it’s possible for a community to embrace nuclear, as Carlsbad has
done. But if you’ve had your fill after seeing Into Eternity,
it’s probably safe to skip Containment.